Time Warner's loss of CBS programming has apparently led to a spike in piracy of certain popular TV shows.

According to Torrent Freak, the CBS blackout on Time Warner has caused an increase in piracy of the popular program "Under the Dome," which is a new CBS series. It's an American science fiction horror series based on Stephen King's novel.

More than 3 million U.S. Time Warner customers lost their CBS programming last Friday due to the fact that Time Warner and CBS just can't come to a broadcasting agreement. The scuffle resulted in a CBS blackout, and for Time Warner subscribers who've been watching "Under the Dome" since its June 2013 debut, this was bad news.

Torrent Freak said it tracked U.S. BitTorrent downloads of last week’s episode of "Under the Dome" as well as the one that aired this past Monday (following the blackout) in an effort to see if piracy of the show increased.

More specifically, it monitored large U.S. cities including Los Angeles, New York City, Boston, Chicago, Dallas, Denver, Detroit and Pittsburgh. According to its results, relatively more people downloaded the latest episode after the blackout -- meaning that more people are resorting to piracy channels.

Torrent Freak added that "of all sampled downloaders in the U.S., 10.9 percent came from the blackout regions for last week's episode, and this increased to 14.6 percent for Monday’s episode, a 34% increase."

In New York City alone, the number of downloads more than doubled from 1.3 percent last week to 3 percent for Monday's episode.

Torrent Freak said it wasn't sure how many downloaders were also Time Warner subscribers, which doesn't exactly prove that the CBS blackout was the cause of increased downloads. However, it did show that official ratings sunk to their lowest on Monday to 10.49 million viewers compared to 11.41 million the week before while piracy downloads increased over the same time period.

Already have broadband, takes 5 seconds to find the tv show on TPB minutes after the show airs, even a 1 gig 1 hour show only takes 3 minutes to dl. HTPC already connected to tv. Yuptorrenting IS much easier, and no commercials to be bothered fast forwarding, sit back and relax.